Acting on impulse: the science behind first impressions

Imagine you're about to be interviewed for a new job. How long do you think you have to impress the person on the other side of the desk? Until the end of the conversation, or until the end of the first answer you give? What would you say if you knew that your prospective new boss had made up their mind before you'd had time to finish your introduction?

Until recently, little study had been made of what happens when we meet someone new. Thirty years ago, an expert in first impressions was more likely to be a self-improvement guru than a psychologist - the kind of person who would advise you on the right way to shake hands if you wanted to win friends.

Research over the past two decades has confirmed that, in a sense, those gurus were correct - a handshake may be all it takes to create a memorable first impression. But what we also know now is just how significant the first few moments of an encounter can be, and to what extent they determine the friends we'll make, the career path we'll pursue and the people we'll fall in love with.

Tricia Prickett, a psychology student, collected a series of videotaped job interviews to test whether it was possible to guess the outcome simply from observing the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. She found that an observer could predict whether or not the interviewee would be offered the job from watching just the first 15 seconds of the tape - the handshake, the "hello" and very little else. What happened in those few, brief moments was enough to determine the candidate's future.

"First impressions are the fundamental drivers of our relationships," says Professor Frank Bernieri of Oregon State University, who supervised Prickett's study. "In a sense, it's a little like the principle of chaos theory, where the initial conditions can have a profound impact on the eventual outcome. A first impression is your initial condition for analysing another human being."

The power of 'thin-slicing'

Bernieri is an expert in what's known as "thin-slicing methodology". His research is based on the theory that we make a reasonably accurate assessment of a person from observing just a few seconds, or a "thin slice", of their behaviour. From the evidence gleaned in not much more than a few glances, we decide whether we like another person, whether they're trying to flirt with us, whether they're friend or foe. If you've ever changed seats on a train or crossed the road to avoid someone, because there was something "not quite right about them", you've used your ability to thin-slice. In that instance, you were probably aware of a gut instinct - you may have felt as if your sense of perception was heightened because there was the possibility of danger - but we thin-slice people in all kinds of situations, not just when we feel threatened. Speed dating is another example of thin-slicing in action.

Those early assessments that we make of people set us on a certain course. If we have decided that a new acquaintance is a certain type of person, who thinks, feels and behaves a certain way, we pay more attention to evidence that confirms our theory is correct. This cognitive phenomenon is known as the "confirmation bias". For example, after meeting a friend's new partner you might decide they are a little aloof. From then on, you will be on the look out for other signs of that aloofness, noticing when they blank someone else at a party, or don't offer to buy a round at the pub. You won't necessarily notice that they offered to buy a round, but everyone declined. We seek out the information that tells us we are right, and we ignore or assign little importance to anything that might suggest otherwise.

A study by Professor Nalini Ambady of Tufts University, Massachusetts demonstrates how powerful this phenomenon can be. At the beginning of their first year, she asked students to fill in an evaluation form of their lecturer, rating him or her for likeability, openness and so on. The forms were completed before any actual lectures had taken place but, two years on, the judgments corresponded almost exactly with the students' final assessments of their tutor. Two years of study had made no difference to what they first thought - the time only served to confirm their initial impression.

Before the theory of thin-slicing was proposed, most of the research done on our talents for reading other people was focussed on body language and lie detection. "There wasn't much systematic research," says Ambady. What the research of the past 20 years has taught us is the power of our intelligent unconscious can perceive in just a few seconds what might take years of evaluation with the rational part of our minds.

It's this concept that is at the heart of many recent works on first impressions, including Malcolm Gladwell's second book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (see below) and Gerd Gigerenzer's Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. One thing all these scientists and writers agree on is that our talent for making such immediate judgments is largely unknowable, and when we begin to question exactly what it is that made us choose a certain way, we begin to second-guess ourselves, and get things wrong.

"Thinking about the judgments you're making could make you less accurate," says Ambady. "We've found that when we ask people to deliberate before they make a decision they tend not to be as good as they are if they do it non-consciously."

When we get it wrong

Although our rapid cognition is fairly accurate, it's still possible for us to misread someone the first time we meet them. No matter how shrewd you might think you are - and most of us like to think we're a good judge of character - we are subject to all kinds of cognitive biases, which stretch and distort our judgment. "There's a classic study where participants are shown a short film of a woman coming home from work," says Bernieri. "Sometimes the woman was labelled 'Janey the waitress', sometimes she was called 'Janey the librarian'. It was a very short movie, nothing much happened, but it turned out that after the film, when researchers asked the viewers to relate what they'd seen, they 'remembered' details consistent with the woman's job. If Janey had been introduced as a librarian, people remembered her wearing glasses, even though she hadn't been."

Our assumptions about how a waitress might behave or the way a librarian might look are so strong that we pay more attention to them than the evidence in front of us.

Indeed, our assumptions and expectations influence the way that we behave. "For example,

if I've heard about you, perhaps from a mutual friend, then I might have already decided I'm going to like you," says Ambady. "Then, when I meet you, I'm going to behave in a more positive way towards you, which, in turn, is going to get you to behave in a more positive way towards me."

Making a good first impression

Of course, there's one secret of first impressions that matters to us more than any other: how to make a good one. Books that advise on how to make an impact or seminars on creating

a brand impression are big business but, if most of the judgments we make are immediate and instinctive, can we ever control the way that other people perceive us?

Although there's little point embarking on a full-scale personality makeover (even if it were feasible or desirable), there are two things to consider if you want to make a good impression.

First, be open. "There's a behavioural principle known as the expressivity halo - people who communicate in an expressive, animated fashion tend to be liked more than difficult-to-read people," says Bernieri, "even if they're expressing something such as irritation. Because we're more confident in our reading of them, they're less of a threat."

Second, make the effort to discover things you have in common. Books you've read, films you've seen, mutual friends or enemies - the things we share create a powerful bond. "It's called the similarity attraction hypothesis," says Bernieri. "It's powerful because it's a cognitive processing phenomenon - a reflex, not an analytical skill."

It isn't rational, but finding out that you share the same name as someone can create a sense of affection for that person. We're even more likely to vote for someone if we think we have something in common.

Challenging your first impressions

Our first few seconds with a person are clearly significant - but are they the best indicator of our future relationship? Not necessarily. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest we can overcome a bad encounter. Richard Burton, in his autobiography Meeting Mrs Jenkins, wrote of meeting future wife Elizabeth Taylor for the first time that "she was so beautiful I nearly laughed out loud. I didn't, of course, which was just as well. The girl was clearly not going to be laughing back. I had an idea that, finding nothing of interest, she was looking right through me and was examining the wall behind."

"The more important your relationship, the more likely it is that you'll be able to reverse your perception," says Bernieri. "But if it's a marginal person in your life then you're much less likely to change your mind about them, because that would require all kinds of analytical work and we tend not to do that, because we're lazy." Indeed, he advises, if we want to form a truly accurate impression of someone, it pays to have a certain lack of faith in our own abilities. Studies indicate that people who tend to be more confident about their judgments of others are in fact less accurate. The best way to overcome natural biases and meet someone with a truly open mind is to make the effort to convince yourself of a contradicting point of view. "It's like preparing ourselves for a debate," says Bernieri. "Say you're meeting someone and they've been described to you a certain way, you could deliberately seek out information that confirmed the opposite. The truth would probably be somewhere inbetween."

• Rosie Ifould is associate features editor at Psychologies magazine

Further reading

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (Penguin)

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer (Allen Lane)

First Impressions: What You Don't Know About How Others See You by Ann Demarais and Valerie White (Hodder Mobius)

Malcolm Gladwell our ability to 'thin-slice'

"Thin-slicing" refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviour based on very narrow slices of experience. It is part of what makes the unconscious so dazzling. But it's also what we find most problematic about rapid cognition. How is it possible to gather the necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in such a short time?

Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.

It is striking, for instance, how many different professions and disciplines have a word to describe the particular gift of reading deeply into the narrowest slivers of experience. In basketball, the player who can take in and comprehend all that is happening around him or her is said to have "court sense".

In the military, brilliant generals are said to possess coup d'oeil - which, translated from the French, means "power of the glance": the ability to immediately see and make sense of the battlefield. Napoleon had coup d'oeil. So did Patton. The ornithologist David Sibley says that in Cape May, New Jersey, he once spotted a bird in flight from 200 yards away and knew, instantly, that it was a ruff, a rare sandpiper. He had never seen a ruff in flight before; nor was the moment long enough to make a careful identification. But he was able to capture what bird-watchers call the bird's "giss" - its essence - and that was enough.

If we couldn't thin-slice - if we could not make sense of complicated situations in a flash - basketball would be chaotic, and bird-watchers would be hopeless.

• This is an edited extract from Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell (Penguin, £9.99)